


Armour

by elephant_eyelash



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 20:12:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elephant_eyelash/pseuds/elephant_eyelash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davos, Gendry and reading lessons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Armour

The letters are no more than curves to him, arbitary marks made by dead men whose laughter at his ineptitude seems to bleed through the pages, clearer and more distinct than the words themselves.   
  
Davos sits across from him, patient. These early morning hours were now theirs. Gendry had quickly become too embarassed to work with Edric and Rickon and Gendry didn’t trust the Maester. He was fearful of their laughter, and even worse, their pity. So Davos sat, and waited, and watched Gendry try to will the words to make sense. The boy ran his fingers along the script, trying almost to feel them, because Gendry’s world was grounded in touch, in sensation, the physical. For a long time Davos’ world had once been the same, a stricter but kinder world, he thought, for men like them.  
  
Davos had been born to be a smuggler and Gendry a blacksmith, but the whirls of the powerful, the winds of change had ripped them away from what they had known, what they were always meant to be. And so they sat here, trying to read words.   
  
“I don’t understand.” Gendry finally murmured.   
  
“What’s that letter?” Davos asked, pointing to the ‘t’. Gendry’s brow creased in concentration. Davos could feel the anger, the frustration sparking off of him. Gendry slammed the book shut and buried his face in his hands. He went to where his tools hang, grabbed his fuller, made a few movemets with it, swinging it like a practise sword. All Davos could see was a boy, his little boy, dreaming dreams of knighthood and stories. It made him feel sad for Gendry, for all the lost sons this war had seen.   
  
“Why does he want me to do this?” Gendry asked quietly.   
  
Davos took a breath of air. “The truth?”   
  
Gendry looked at him warily, then nodded.   
  
“There’s not much of his family left.” Davos said. “His Grace’s brothers are dead, and Shireen is unlikely to produce any children.” He paused, looked Gendry up and down, the handsome face, the huge frame. He looked much like Robert, but had the introspection of his uncle, his new King. The nobility was there, maybe, waiting to be refined. “The Baratheons cannot perish. And if he has to make do with his brother’s bastards, so be it.”   
  
Gendry smiled a little at that, the bluntness. He was like Stannis in that way, too, in that he liked his words clear, direct, solid. Gendry swung the fuller in a circle, then placed it gently on the table.   
  
“Arya says it helps if you make the words like pictures.” Gendry said, his fingertips still poised on the tool. “But I still can’t do it.”   
  
Davos tensed a little at the lack of formality, the ease in which the boy said her name.   
  
“I know how to read _her_ name.” Gendry offered.   
  
Davos looked at him, puzzled.   
  
“She wrote it down once and I memorised it.” He shrugged. He took the fuller and wrote out Arya’s name on the packed clay floor. Davos studied it for a moment, then stood up. He smoothed out her name from the floor and motioned to Gendry for the fuller. He wrote two letters into the ground.   
  
“And what’s that?” He asked.   
  
Gendry frowned a little before aswering. “Ar.”   
  
Davos wrote two more letters. He looked up to Gendry from where he was perched on the floor. Davos retraced the letters again. A long time passed.   
  
“M. That’s an ‘m’.” Gendry finally said. “And that’s an…’a’?”   
  
“No, it’s an ‘o’. Like a circle.” Davos motioned. He wrote two more letters. Gendry looked even more confused. Outside the light of the dawn broke through the window of the forge, highlighting the last two letters, stretching their shadows to the walls. Gendry sat down beside the letters, rapt, determined.   
  
“‘W’, no, no.” He muttered. ” ‘U’, that’s a ‘u’, isn’t it? And that’s an ‘r’.”   
  
He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, his mouth trying to feel the letters, the sounds. Davos willed him silently on. Gendry went over each and every letter, reforming them and re-piecing them in his mind, willing the marks and curves on the ground to become something real.  
  
“Armour.” He said, finally, in a shuddered, weary breath. The words curl around his chest and dissipate.


End file.
